So I’ve been seeing this new thing in blog-o-land called Twitter. It seems to me (after a whole five minutes of looking at it and a Mac client for it called Twitterific) that it’s a bloggy stream-of-consciousness environment. Twitter definitely has a cool factor, and might have some real purpose.

Right now, I’m at a loss for what that purpose could be though.

From what I can see, it doesn’t look like there’s a way to reply to “tweet” posted on Twitter, which would seem like it limits the interaction somewhat. However, for a “here’s what I’m thinking right now” quicky comment, Twitter appears ideal.

The interface though appears really slooooooow. Almost as bad as MySpace.

So, I’m signing up, and you may see some things on the Deauxmayne dealing with Twitter. Enjoy the dust, endure the noise, and we’ll find out together if there’s anything I do with this new space.

Ya know, for a kid that grew up with an old Teletype for a terminal, and punched paper tape for archival storage, the things I can do with my Apple lifestyle are truly amazing.

Here I sit at my desk, working for a decidedly Microsoft-friendly company with no tolerance for “foreign” machines on their network…. and yet, here I am, blogging away on my MacBook, tempering my workday with tunes from my iPod, all the while wirelessly connected to the ‘net through the magic of Sprint’s wireless broadband network. I can see my mail, just as if I was in my home office. I can maintain my webserver, just like I was in its closet at home. I can troll for the latest news on updates to products I care about. I can work on my images, copying them from home to wherever I am, and then returning them to my home network, ready to use in printing, web or delivery to a customer.

When I was growing up, we all thought the computer technology that we saw on Star Trek was where we were headed. We were right, and wrong.

I mean, voice technology is out there, but its not ubiquitous, nor is it bulletproof. There have been great demos showing systems that understand contextual differences between homonymns, but in general, the technology that would allow me to talk to my system in normal language and get things done correctly just isn’t mature… yet.

But storage…. man oh man… storage! Twenty years ago, I had a hard drive in my home machine, probably an old Seagate ST-238R that, with the aid of an RLL controller, was supporting about 30 megabytes of data. The laptop I’m typing on now has a modest 100GB drive in it, and it feeds back to a machine at home with 1.25TB plus an additional 1TB RAID array. Those are fantastic amounts of storage compared to just twenty years ago.

And there are so many other changes — processor speeds, graphic displays and resolution, digital cameras, etc., etc., etc.

At one time or another, I’m sure everyone who has a little time in the IT field probably waxes historical over the changes in the hardware and software, and what those changes are letting folks do nowadays as compared to sometime in the (relatively) recent past. For me, though, this year marks my 30th anniversary of working with this stuff in one form or another, and I find myself reflecting a bit more on what was, and looking forward to what is to come.

For me, the biggest change has been the move to the Mac, and how incredibly less time I spend maintaining my three Macs, and how much more time I have to be creative on them. That is the single biggest advance my switch to the Mac just about two years ago has bought me. Rarely have I found some perplexing system problem that I coudn’t solve, and instead, I find myself trying to figure out how to find enough time for all the creative things this wonderful hardware and software combo affords me the capability to do.

Man, these are great days to be living in!

In my newsreader this morning was a blurb from James Duncan Davidson concerning batteries. As he waxed about rechargeable batteries, he mentioned Maha cells. Now I’ve been hearing about Maha cells for a long, long time through QST and other ham radio oriented material. So where did he end up buying them?

Ham Radio Outlet.

The world really is a small world, after all!

We had nothing going on today, so we slept in. And I mean “slept in” — I got out of bed at 10am, which is highly unusual for me. I’m usually up with the sun, if not before. It was the best night of sleep I’ve had in months though, and that makes it worth it.

Add to the picture that the sky was dropping tiny snowflakes on us, and it made for a perfect morning.

As it was already late in the day, we decided to start out our day with corned beef and cabbage, and headed down to Mulligan’s, a little sports bar down the street from us. By the time we got out the door around noon, the sky was full of largest snowflakes I’ve seen in years. They were giant clumps of flakes, falling like crazy. None of it stuck, but for hours and hours it looked like a scene from a winter’s postcard.

Surprisingly, there wasn’t much of a wait at Mulligan’s. Once we were seated, what was the very first thing I put in my body on this day? A green beer. Having missed the away-from-home college experience, I don’t know that I’ve ever started out my day with a beer, but today, it seemed like the right thing to do.

Mulligan’s serves up a mean plate of corned beef and cabbage too. Huge portion — but great for breakfast! — and tasty. Now, Darla makes the best corned beef and cabbage I’ve ever had, and spoiled me with it last night, but Mulligan’s plate was tasty too, and was even served with a little horseradish sauce on the side. I’m a horseradish (and wasabe) fan, so this was right up my alley.

So, with a belly full of corned beef, and a head full of green beer, I’ve continued getting ready for the show at the end of the month. I believe I’ll have two tables at this show, and with that extra display space, I expect to be showing a lot of new pieces, along with having a whole bunch of smaller pieces available. My strategy is a little different for this show.

In the last show, I had a few large images on easles behind the table, and I’ll do that again this time. However this time, I won’t have to dedicate such a large percentage of the table space to those. I’ll be able to spread out many more affordable pieces, and hopefully grab folks’ attention with plenty of very reasonably priced items. Consider it a marketing experiment!

I’ve been screaming about Sennheiser headphones for over twenty years. My first set of good headphones were Sennies, complete with the yellow earpads that were as synonymous with Sennheiser as white is nowadays with iPods. They were simply built, but delivered powerful sound from my Sansui rack system.

The hook was set, and I listened with Sennies whenever I could, even buying some small PX100′s for listening at work. Alas, as with many love affairs of epic proportion, a new love has been found — Bose.

I took a listen to the current crop of Bose headphones around Christmas at Ultimate Electronics, and fell in love with the sound. The on-ear and over-ear designs both delivered terrific sound from the small testing station in the store. I thought, “Who knows how that music has been tailored to sound good on those headphones.” So, although I asked Saint Nick for a pair, I didn’t really pursue it real hard.

For some reason though, this week I decided to treat myself to a new toy, and that was the Bose OE (on-ear) headphones. Beck and I went to Best Buy yesterday at lunch, and I once again compared the two configurations, and in a close call, the on-ear cans won. I ferried them home last night, and began listening again for the first time in a long while.

You see, these things sing! I haven’t heard sound this clearly in years and years. I don’t wanna knock my Sennheisers — they still sound good — but this is a revelatory experience. I’m reminded of my first pair of Sennheisers in the early 80s, when I put some good vinyl on, and laid in the floor, quiet, and listening to every nuance of the music I thought I knew well.

Of course, the experience is different now. We carry all the music we can on an iPod, and we listen everywhere, rather than in a special place. But, even at work today, I find myself transported away by the quiet solitude of these headphones, and their seemingly amazing sound reproduction. I’ve tried the fun stuff — the cannons in the “1812 Overture”, the valve rattles in “The Planets”, the breathing just before the beginning of the “The Chain”, the massive thumping bass in “Let’s Go Crazy”, and those amazing, haunting harmonies in “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby” — and these headphones have handled it, and handled it well. No clipping, no distortion, and a solid, bright sound that just seems to come from everywhere. And I’m hearing things in some of my music that I’ve never heard before.

Another interesting thing about these headphones is just how quiet they are. I mentioned quiet solitude before, and I meant it. Even though these aren’t the noise cancelling Bose headphones, I still get a massive amount of quiet from them. I suppose since they sit on the ear, that helps, but there’s something just special about these that makes the rest of the world go away, without having to crank the volume up so much that the world is drowned out.

Tonight, I’ll be giving them a nice long run, laying in the floor, critically listening to some of my old favorites, getting reacquainted with them, as well as listening to some new favorites as though I’ve never listened to them before. This is gonna be a fun, fun night.

CompUSA going out of business is a bad deal, and I’ve written about that before. However, I still find myself going in there, trying to find a bargain…. a cable, a card reader (’cause you can never have too many of ‘em), something. Tonight, I dove in there looking for a ditty bag to carry all my paraphenalia inside my laptop bag — mice, card readers, cables, etc. Basically something to corral all that required stuff, and keep it quarantined from the rest of the bag until I need something.

When I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I wandered through the store, and happened through the printer paper aisle.

That’s the first moment I realized I had the disease — paperholism. I searched greedily through the boxes of paper, passing by the HP, Kodak, Canon and even Ilford…. until I found the Epson papers. And not only did they have matte papers, and not only were they in 8½x11, but they also had 11×17! I’d been looking casually for this size, as I planned to print my portfolio at that size — I already bought the binder for it — and hadn’t actually seen that paper around… until tonight.

Oh my, did I gather up the boxes of paper — they even had some velvet stock that I might go back for. One, two, three…. the boxes kept leaping from the shelves into my waiting arms. By the time I’d checked out, I had two boxes of 11×17, and two boxes each of two different kind of 8½x11 matte paper all being lugged to the car.

Yes folks, your humble writer has the bug, and has it bad. Who knows what kinds of paper adventures I’ll have next!

Over at The Strobist, David points us to a flipbook portfolio by George Lange. The presentation is cool, but… (drumroll… it’s time for hard, self-analysis, and a little mantra chanting…)

It’s photography like this that absolutely makes me know this is my first, best destiny.

I cannot believe the incredible use of light and creation of moods of which this photographer has command. It is truly amazing. And it’s not that there are famous folks along the way — I mean, that’s cool — but it’s the evoking of emotion that stuns me. Admittedly, the flipbook presentation is cool, along with the music, but I still come back to the photography. Stunning just doesn’t give it enough credit, but I don’t think I know the adjectives to describe it.

Go, take a look, and see what you think. For me, this is one doozy of a portfolio and presentation, but the wallop really comes from the images themselves and what they made me feel.

And after all, isn’t that what photographers are supposed to do?

So how was your time change?

After a tremendous flurry of activity last week trying to resolve late-announced issues with various pieces of technology, the weekend’s events were relatively quiet. Today, I only heard of one issue discovered, and that’s not bad.

The biggest issue I’ve seen has been the much-reported issues with Outlook getting meeting times correct. I was in a load of meetings where folks weren’t where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there. Nice spectator sport.

The gear at The Deauxmayne played nicely with Father Time has he sprung forward, with all the Apples doing what they needed to do. Cool, cool, cool…..

After having a couple of shows already where there was a bunch of downtime, I tried to figure out how to better use that downtime, and perhaps keep connected for orders, etc. About that same time, I discovered an e-mail at work about a deal I could get with Sprint for wireless broadband.

For those who haven’t heard of it, wireless broadband is broadband-like speeds, but over the cellular networks. I was skeptical about the speeds, but there were enough folks out there raving about the speeds, that I decided to give it a whirl.

I ordered a USB version — my MacBook doesn’t have slots for any of the card-based formats, and frankly, a USB cell-modem gives me a lot of flexibility to move it around in the future.

But, for Mac users, there’s an inconvenient truth: You have to unlock the device on a Windows machine. Once it’s unlocked, you can install the Apple WWAN update and the Sprint software, and the thing just works. All this is documented on Sprint’s site, and seems to work as documented.

So how good is it?

St. Louis currently is only EVDO — the EVDO Rev A stuff arrives here in a couple of months — so the fastest speeds are yet to come. However, the current incarnation is faster than my first broadband connection was not that many years ago. From the office (where I’m writing this right now on my MacBook over the connection), I get over 1200bps down and 130bps up. When Rev A hits, the uplink speeds will be even better.

Sprint also has an all-you-can-eat data plan for the thing that’s not too terribly expensive — again cheaper than any broadband plan I’ve owned.

In theory, I should be able to update galleries, and do some advanced work in the field, as long as there’s a cell tower close by. Very, very cool!

With the announced shuttering of half of the CompUSA stores in the US, I’ve discovered that all three CUSA stores in the St. Louis area are no longer listed among the company’s store locations, leading me to believe ours will be gone. This leaves us with BestBuy and Circuit City as the major computer/electronics dealers in town. ‘Tis a pity.

If you needed a cable, a connector, lights to mod your case, a fancy cooling fan or a high-end printer (CUSA was the only chain in town carrying the Epson R2400 printer), then CUSA was your stop. Their customer service wasn’t always stellar, but you could pretty much count on them having what you needed. If they didn’t have, it’s a good bet no one else in town did either.

I surely don’t see BB and CC filling the void that will be left by CUSA. It’s the business models of those stores, in particular BB, that likely drove CUSA’s demise. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” so I’d expect the small parts and eclectic computer gear niche will be absent, save for some small selections at the mom-and-pop shops.

Alas, CompUSA, I knew ye well.